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Starting a new job means signing up for benefits. In terms of health insurance, this has usually boiled down to choosing either an HMO or PPO plan for us. I still have never been offered the option of a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP) with a Health Savings Account, even though I think it would be neat to have one.

Several people have asked me for some tips on how to find health insurance. I didn’t mean to scare anyone, but if my intense pain reminds someone to get insurance, at least something good came out of it! I did do some searching myself last year - the good news is that if you are young and in good health, you can get some high-deductible insurance for around $100 a month. The deductibles may still reach in the thousands, but $5,000 would be the least of your worries if you had just one serious incident. A reader got billed $3,075 for each CT scan taken!

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Hospital care is expensive, but it's particularly pricey for uninsured patients who pay "list prices" for care, which can be several times higher than what an insurer pays for treatment. After being overcharged for emergency care, a couple of uninsured patients in California have filed a lawsuit that is aimed at getting hospitals to charge uninsured patients similar prices to what insurers pay to make hospital care a bit more affordable for the uninsured. In effect, the suit argues that charging list prices is effectively price gouging.

Louisiana is exploring the possibility of shifting some state funding away from charity care toward vouchers for adults to purchase health insurance in the private market. Proponents of the reform are touting the plan as a free market alternative to charity care that will allow uninsured adults with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty line to have more choice of physicians and hospitals and the ability to get non-emergency care outside of the hospital. The proposal could also make care more accessible.

Do you remember the days when there were only a few major car insurance companies to choose from? While you may long for those days, you probably don’t long for the high prices. With more competition, companies have been forced to keep their prices down. After all, everything is so expensive today that every consumer is looking for anyway they can to save money. In other words, if one car insurance company offers lower rates most consumers are going to migrate to them.

A California appellate court has ruled that consumers with individual health policies can file class action suits against insurance companies who wait to review applications and then revoke coverage after a policyholder becomes sick. The appeals court also held that if an insurer fails to properly attach a copy of the policy to an individual's application, it loses the right to rescind a policy retroactively, regardless of the accuracy of the initial application.

One of the biggest problems with the current state of the health insurance industry is that many people think that they do not need coverage. In other words, they know that it is not required by law, so in turn they simply avoid purchasing. While this may sound like a good idea, it is far from that. The bottom line is that everybody needs to think of health insurance as a must-have instead of something that is more or less a “luxury item.” Or at least Hillary Clinton thinks so.

A recent review article in the New England Journal of Medicine has found that the use of CT scans to diagnose patients has increased dramatically over the past two decades leading to potentially dangerous overexposure to radiation. When used appropriately, CT scans can be extremely useful diagnostic tools. Unfortunately, approximately one third of scans seem to be unnecessary, despite the "direct evidence from epidemiologist studies that the organ doses corresponding to a common CT scan…result in an increased risk of cancer."